Light Cone
by Becca Stareyes
Summary: Spock Prime meditates on this strange new timeline that has such people in it.


Spock's roommate at the Academy had been another science-track cadet. Human, excessively cheerful and prone to sentimentality, or so it had seemed at the time, but with a keen intellect and a quick wit. They had gotten along quite well, actually, and had exchanged mail off and on years later.

During their third year, there had been an outage in the subspace network around Earth, just long enough to cause a tremendous back up. He had had to delay sending the letter he had composed to his mother. His roommate had gotten used to Spock's schedule and had noticed this, to the point where he had taken the antique telescope that he kept under his bunk and had insisted that Spock accompany him to the quad.

"There," his roommate had said after undergoing the arduous process to position the device by hand. "Look."

Spock would not have been able to identify the multiple star system his roommate had maneuvered the telescope to point at -- it was an orangish K-type star, with a faint white companion and a red M-type star nearly resolvable from the white star -- if he hadn't learned enough of human behavior to make a reasonable inference. He didn't even need to glance at where the telescope was pointed in the sky. "Forty Eridani. Vulcan's primary."

"I thought you might like to see home, since the network's down," his roommate replied.

Spock quirked an eyebrow. "You cannot resolve Vulcan from its primary, and its brightness would be far too low to see with this telescope. Even if a suitable instrument could be constructed, we are 16 light years away. I would see my childhood, and any electromagnetic message I could send would take as long to arrive there." He knew his roommate knew that. Every science-track cadet knew that, and his roommate had just delivered an excellent paper on using the expanding light cone and a warp capable ship with strong telescopes and sensitive electromagnetic sensors to observe events in the past.

"Sentiment, Spock."

Of course, by that time, other cadets free for the evening had noticed the telescope, and a crowd was starting to form. Spock told his roommate that, as long as the network was down, he might as well return to his studies.

Now, he was back in San Francisco, on Academy grounds that were familiar but out of place in his present. Much like the people, for that matter. Seeing Jim and Scotty, both far too young, on Delta Vega, had been a shock. A needed shock, perhaps, after seeing Vulcan turned into a small black hole. A reminder of his own duties, that even in a universe where his life would never be the one he remembered, his first home destroyed, and many people he had met never to exist, he still had things to do.

So did they, for that matter. The loss of seven ships of the line around Vulcan and most of the Academy's upperclassmen had left holes. Not to mention Nero's changes in the timeline -- the destruction of the _Kelvin_ two and a half decades ago by a Romulan ship, even a strange one whose captain had disavowed the Empire, had nearly caused the Federation to re-enter its war. Spock had already downloaded a quarter-century of current events to attempt to piece together the new history as it happened. Surely, the destruction of Vulcan would not go unnoticed by them.

Other changes were starting to show up -- Spock had noticed that first contact with the Cardassians had been made far earlier than he remembered, and there was already talk in Intelligence circles that they might be more than just 'distant trade partners'. Occasionally, as he walked, he'd see a species that he didn't think had cadets in Starfleet until later, or notice a group of alien ambassadors that he thought had been part of the Federation. And it would only get worse, he suspected, as changes built up and the light cone of Nero's disturbance in the timeline spread, like the metaphorical 'chaos butterfly' humans used as an example of the sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Not to mention the crew of the Enterprise, _his_ crew and not his crew. Jim was still brash and doing most of his thinking subconsciously, acting on these 'hunches' while not realizing all of the mostly-logical steps in between. Usually after the fact. On the other hand, the Jim Kirk Spock had remembered knew how to keep to his orders when in contact with Command. Most of the time. Perhaps it was just the fact he had never known Jim as a cadet, but Spock suspected it was the lack of George Kirk as a role model, and had said as much. Outside of the people lost in the _Kelvin_'s destruction, Jim had been the first one touched by this change in timeline.

He had observed the rest of the crew, secure in the fact that most humans couldn't tell a full Vulcan from a half-human Vulcan, and that his own advanced age would make him unlikely to be associated with 'their' Spock. Certainly Scotty hadn't made the connection, even after meeting his younger self. They seemed unpolished, as many cadets were, but to be the same people as he remembered.

That was going to change, now. He had observed that both great tragedy and great heroism had an effect on people, and this was the crew's first tastes of both. Already he had seen Scotty speaking to some of the scientists and engineers, trying to describe his corrected transwarp transporter theory, without mentioning that the final piece was brought to him from his future self by an old -- or new -- friend. He had seen Hikaru Sulu and Pavel Chekov at the center of crowds of cadets -- with more than a few officers lurking just within earshot, but not close enough that the cadets had to notice them -- describing the Battles of Vulcan and Earth, as the media was already describing them. The light cone had reached all of them, and things would not be the same as Spock remembered. Similar, perhaps, but never the same.

Spock glanced to the sky. The stars were visible. Below and to the west of the constellation of Orion, he picked out the cloud of stars of Eridanus, the river. Forty Eridani was barely visible in the city, even with good low-light vision. If he had a telescope now, he would still not see Vulcan, though its reflected light would still be there for another sixteen point two years.

But, that too would change.


End file.
